"Mrs. Hippopotamuses'" by Relient K, Sunday, June 20, 2021

Born south of the Erie Canal in Canton, Ohio, Matt Thiessen, wrote a tribute to his home state on Relient K's 8th studio album, Air for Free. Relient K started in Ohio, with three friends--Thiessen, guitarist Matt Hoopes, and bassist Brian Pittman. Relient K has seen many phases and had many member change ups; however, the glue of the band has been Thiessen and Hoopes, who are the only remaining members of the band and who are pictured on the cover of Air for Free. Released six years ago, Air for Free explores existential themes from an aging former teenage band. Then in his mid-thirties, Thiessen touches on themes of love, growing up, and faith. While the songs on Air for Free are mostly light-hearted (a notable exception is "Man") and sometimes silly, the songs are certainly more mature than anything the band has done before. And while it might not be the rock out anthems of youth group church vans, it's lyrically nostalgic of those days at times while pushing their listeners forward.

I GREW UP IN THE STICKS. Canton, Ohio has a population of about 71,000 people as of 2019. It seems to be cool to say you are from a small town. It's part of the fame origin story. Look at me, a guy from Podunk, XX made it big, you can too. I, too, grew up in the sticks, but there were far more sticks than people, where I was born. When I tell my students I was born in New York, I have to show a slide show of my reality. I was born in Norwich, NY the city that was a 30 minute drive depending on the weather and the condition of the pot-holed dirt roads. The population of Norwich was about 7,000 as of 2020, though it was probably bigger when I grew up because people left with the decline of the rustbelt in the '90s. The town I went to school in was Oxford. It has a population of about 4,000 people. But my address was McDonough with its 850 people living there. My family moved to Morganton, a bustling city in North Carolina with about 17,000 people living there. Part of me always wonders what would have happened if I stayed in New York. I've attempted writing a novel about it. I tended to idealize the scenes of my childhood landscape--the cool summers, the heavy snows in winter, the wood stoves and chilly mornings in the fall, the New York pizza and Italian food. But my family was right to move south to a better home, out of the moldy trailer that kept me sick every winter.

SUMMERTIME IS 45 MINUTES AWAY. Thiessen references Ohio's amusement part Cedar Point, located on Lake Erie in Sandusky. In North Carolina we had Carowinds. Before we moved, we had the country fair in late August. Sure some people got to take a trip to Hershey Park in Pennsylvania, but my family didn't spend money on that kind of thing until we moved to North Carolina. Carowinds used to be owned by Paramount, so they had themed rides for movies and television shows. Their flagship ride was Top Gun, a steel rollercoaster that was supposed to simulate flying in fighter jets as in the Tom Cruise movie. Later, they opened Borg Assimilator, a scary looking ride that had a prohibitively long line to board it. Luckily, that line prevented us from taking it because it later got stuck with the passengers upside down for 45 minutes. In 2006, Carowinds was purchased by Cedar Fair, which resulted in the renaming and rebranding of most of the rides. I was a young adult and Carowinds didn't feel the same. It was an eerie feeling calling the rollercoasters by a different name. 

Read the lyrics on Genius.